


gong show of your valiant downfall

by gamblers



Category: Slam Dunk
Genre: Gen, M/M, Memory Loss, Touou High (Freeform)
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-01-04
Updated: 2015-01-04
Packaged: 2018-03-05 06:58:42
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,834
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3110372
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/gamblers/pseuds/gamblers
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The biggest baddest love story this side of the century just crawled up into Rukawa's ass and died there.</p>
            </blockquote>





	gong show of your valiant downfall

**Author's Note:**

> no real agenda here, more of an experiment in injury --> psychosomatic memory loss. i guess when it comes to slaying personal demons you're either 后卫中锋 or 流川枫

When Kaede returns from America, his talent begins to rust.

Not that anybody notices. The minute he lands in Narita the flashbulbs descend on him to chip away again at his extremely photogenic sanity, girls swarm the customs gate like he's some fucking Johnny's idol and reporters trail the wheels of his suitcase to flick questions into his face, perpetuating the romance of his chaotic homecoming until Kaede can escape into an airport taxi and shove desperate wads of American currency into the driver's hands.

Ultimately he'll let the media outlets do him the way they want, because there's not much room for him to fend it off anyway. He'll charm the nation with the back of his expired Lakers jersey and continue to pretend that he isn't the archetype celebrity who prolongs career accomplishments past the grain of routine eat-fuck-play-shit-sleep. Because eventually they'll give up. Eventually two days of temporary retirement will settle into two weeks of social irrelevance will settle into two months of cold war, waged against an occasional sports journalist waiting to get his ass handed back to him at the lobby doors of a modest apartment complex in Kanagawa, five streets away from Kaede's old house and closer than ever to the neighborhood where Shohoku used to be.

Thereafter, his purpose will be good as gone.

His hashtag stops trending locally sometime around New Year's, and after several spells of waking up to hot blasts of deja vu and finding a crooked crust of ennui developing between his finger joints, he finally starts to recognize the flow of an external timeline hitting him upside the head. By then it's too late. His instincts roll off to the side of the bed while he sleeps, and before he can jog to the gym at 5am and dribble them back up from the ground they've already crawled through his brain and fallen out of his ears, one by one by five, as if they'd never been there to begin with.

Playing world-class basketball had, at some point, meant everything to him. It slips through his fingertips now just like everything else.

“Hey, you're Rukawa Kaede aren't you,” one of the kids on the street will still ask him, when he emerges from his apartment to keep a hand dipped inside the basketball hoops. He ignores them all on principle, just like he's always done in high school, secretly relieved because it's maybe become more of a matter of not being able to come up with a believable response.

Scenario 1: _“Yes, I am.”_ —But he's not really Rukawa Kaede, not any more.  
Scenario 2: _“What's it to you?”_ —He hasn't been Rukawa Kaede for quite a while.  
Scenario 3: _“What the hell, Sakuragi, what are you even doing here?”_

But it shouldn't come as a surprise, really, that Sakuragi Hanamichi is the one who picks up on him first.

In the realm of heartbreaking sports injuries Hanamichi is somebody who's already walked that walk, and on request could probably produce a highlight reel of every single time he's slammed dick-first into a referee's table, all of it executed in the grand old name of breathing life back into a held ball. Kaede's self-proclaimed archnemesis has not changed a single bit since high school—still the biggest idiot, taking the biggest idiot cake in the history of biggest idiots. But despite that trademark absence of brain activity and general uselessness beyond getting into physical altercations, Hanamichi had not in fact been born yesterday, evidenced now by this vague offer of his to accompany Kaede on his physician's appointment.

“Nobody asked you to come,” Kaede tells him curtly, when Hanamichi waves him down from the parking lot below his apartment.

Hanamichi only laughs at him, bright and out-of-control. “Missed you too, you big fugly fox.”

He understands that clinics for Kaede are mostly an exercise to chase away an ex-NBA player's ex-NBA ghosts, a ceasefire zone not to be questioned for its dubious quality or lack of effectiveness, and out of this understanding he makes no further comment about the trip itself. He doesn't wince when Kaede's physician unravels the bandage around Kaede's arm to reapply ointment and administer a massage, mouths random words of encouragement when Kaede's getting his scans done, whistles through his teeth when asked to spot Kaede while he's benching one-handed. No ill intentions at all.

...That, or maybe Hanamichi's simply switched-up his strategy. He could be revisiting his tried-and-tested practice of vulturing over Kaede during any soft-shelled sign of trouble. Fucker likes to keep people guessing like that.

“Remember that time, in our first year at Shohoku, second match of the Interhigh against Sannou,” Hanamichi starts to say, the moment they exit the clinic and barely after Kaede's finished struggling with the seatbelt in his shitty Toyota. “Remember when you passed to me for the first time?”

“I don't,” says Kaede quite naturally, possibly out of reflex. The idea of passing to Hanamichi is a concept that would never occur to him in a lifetime of basketball, much less during his Shohoku era. They'd really hated each other back then, and a watery byproduct of the same variety probably circulates the electric field between him and Hanamichi, even now. 

“Whaaat. We won the game off of that pass. And my shooting, of course. Mostly my shooting, let's be real. Remember that?”

“I don't recall that ever happening, you idiot.”

“Don't play me,” Hanamichi grins. “Your ego was so fucking fat back then, Rukawa. They all thought you were invincible up until that game, but I knew it all along! The genius basketman always knows."

"..."

"It hurt you to do it, because you knew that I was gonna shoot the buzzer beater instead of you. You'll remember that pass until the day you die.”

Kaede feels a disassociative spark in his words. In that moment he _actually doesn't remember_ , and he's somewhat taken aback by how strongly Sakuragi insists on the drama in this spectacular display of poor game judgement on his behalf. Like hell Kaede would ever pass a ball to Hanamichi, he's being honest with himself, but he can't bring himself to resolutely deny all of the hope blooming out of Hanamichi's wild imagination.

“I guess it might have happened,” he finally manages to say. “I was probably out of my mind that day. I think you're blowing things I've done out of proportion."

“What's wrong with you?” says Hanamichi, kind of crestfallen. “Do you seriously not remember?”

Kaede snorts. “You idiot, maybe _you're_ not remembering correctly. Did we ever even go up against a Sannou? I thought we played Touou Gakuen in the second match of the Interhigh that year.”

In that second, Hanamichi spots a fissure developing in the crack faster than anybody would ever give him credit for.

“...Rukawa, that was second year. We played against Touou in our second year.”

“Hm.”

“They were the team with the pervy Kansai captain and that annoying chuunibyou kid who kept apologizing for making all his free throws. Oh yeah and that tanned dude who never stopped bullshitting us about how he was the only one who could beat himself. What was his name again, Aosuke? Man, he was so high-strung. You ended up kicking his dirty ass in the one-on-one matchup, you dumb fox. What the hell. You remember, right?”

“Hm.”

_“You remember, right?”_

(Kaede still doesn't.)

  


Out of courtesy to history, they decide to visit the old Shohoku grounds.

Hanamichi parks his car in the dusty gravel and they both get out, surveying the overgrown schoolyard with the wanderlust disinterest of travelers who have spent their whole lives trying to escape a single place, only to come back to it with overwhelming memories of the past bound up to their ears. The municipal high school suspended its operations two years ago, when the prefectural education board finally acted on its plans to migrate Shohoku's dwindling student population to a newer feed school, closer to the central library and the cram schools. Since then, the local landscape has shifted toward a wilder angle. There's some graffiti on the west wing now, a pile of cigarette butts accumulate near the baseball shed, and the gymnasium is totally rundown, but by the looks of it at least it's still in use as a makeshift street court by some of the neighborhood kids. Regardless there is no longer any trace of the hot-blooded first-year club hopeful staying after hours to wipe the floors and scrub all the balls clean with towels. Similarly, Sakuragi Hanamichi's reign of terror as Shohoku's Basketball Club captain only exists as a distant story of the past.

They pick their way through the rubble on the blacktop and onto Shohoku's field track, Hanamichi walking a little ways ahead of Kaede.

“They're gonna tear this place down in a few months,” Hanamichi shakes his head. “I heard from Ryo-chin that a development company is coming in to build a big shopping centre, bastards got the papers all signed off at the district office already. Pretty soon there's gonna be nothing left of our old high school. Isn't that kinda sad?”

"I wouldn't know," Kaede shrugs. Shohoku had been a place for him to generate self-prophetic dreams whilst sleeping through his core classes, halls pasted thin with whatever leftover energy that could splash over from the basketball gym. Hanamichi's Shohoku had probably taken on a similar note to his. Whatever the case, their combined Shohoku is a totally different story. It didn't matter anyway. He's already starting to draw blanks.

“Hey, aren't you glad you came back in time, before Shohoku totally disappeared off the map?”

The question feels almost challenging, and inexplicably Kaede's arm starts to hurt. “To tell you the truth, I don't know if it would have mattered. I've almost forgotten everything to do with this damn place.”

Hanamichi turns and stares at Kaede directly. “Is that it, then.”

“That's it, yeah.”

"That's really all you've got to say?"

"Is there anything that I need to say? Don't expect so much from me."

“Just what else have you forgotten,” Hanamichi's voice has gone soft. His eyes are kind of shiny in the gathering dark, and if Kaede hadn't known any better, he might've thought that the idiot was about to cry. “Don't tell me you don't remember any details about the three years we played ball here. Fuck, what about our Shohoku Basketball Club? What about Gori from first year, huh, what about Micchi and Ryo-chin and Megane-kun and the rest of our team members, _what about Haruko-san_ , what about Ayako-san and Anzai-sensei and what about our rivals... Shit, I guess you've forgotten all about Sannou's Sawakita but what about Ryonan's Sendou? How about Shoyo's Fujima and Kainan's Maki? Does any of this still fucking ring a bell to you?”

“Sakuragi, I...”

Hanamichi walks back then and leans in, kisses Kaede softly on the mouth. “Did you forget about this, too?”

Rukawa swallows hard.

**Author's Note:**

> lol @ aosuke


End file.
